I attended high school in Malaysia. To be honest, I never thought it was anything too strenuous or rigorous but when I came to the UK I realised how demanding my school had been! First of all, we had about thirteen subjects, and we had to study from 7.30am to 4.30pm each day. We usually had 30 minutes for lunch, 20 minutes for a morning break and 10 minutes for an afternoon break. We didn't usually just end at 4.30pm - we often had extracurriculars after, so most of us only left school at around about 6pm. We would usually have time to gobble down some dinner, before attending night lessons from 7pm to 9pm. That was my high school life, but it didn't really feel at all tiring! In Indonesia where my cousins live, they start at 7.15am and end at 1.30pm on a normal school day. With extracurriculars they would end at 3pm or 4pm. However, given the state of Jakarta's congestion they often had to wake up at 4.30am to beat the traffic! That, in my opinion, is much more stressful. When I was at college in England, we only had about 4 hours a day, though a typical school day lasted from 9am to 5pm. In a sense it was quite like university, where you were given the liberty to spend the rest of the day for "self-study" while you only had a few hours of contact time with the lecturer.

Well, depend on your level of knowledge & how fit teacher to you, Searchings of "right" teacher - may be a hard task + another task -if your teacher became more and more popular - he / she has less time for you. Also you should have right book and plane with exact tasks of your study, I have 2 online + 1 offline teacher and work in accordance with my demands. Each lesson continues in range of 1 hour (not academic) - 1,5 hours, from my experience - that quite enough; you'll adjust this point (also frequency of lessons per week) after 1-2 weeks of learning. Beware - teacher is just independent controller of your tasks whose clarify you difficult points/areas of foreign lang., but locomotive of your skills - is you. Let me know to private mess, if you have more q. I have a lot of exp. in Skype English.